No Title

So today is a day off, and for the first time in what feels like months I actually have no commitments! It's weird! As soon as I got home from work yesterday, I felt the need to keep busy. This spun on into the night as I channel surfed, surfed the web, read a bit, ate like a pig :)--anything to keep busy. I think I've been "ON" for so long I'd forgotten how to shut off.

It was an emotional week finding out Kelli was leaving for Pajama Game, a few cast/crew birthdays, the commotion of Halloween...but a wonderful week. More fun celebs came to see us (Meryll Streep, Ron Rifkin, Florence Henderson, to name a few), we got extended through July!!!, and I got to meet dozens of kids from different high school music groups at the stage door.

Never a dull moment...until today :) Just bills, errands, grocery shopping, balancing the checkbook, catching up on phone calls, going to the gym (my once a week salvage), and spending time with my special lady. Amazing--all of that and I still feel like today was a no commitment boring day :)

Piazza audiences are the best!

Leaving the theater tonight I was again flattered to see so many people outside our stage door. I met a man who heard the music in a concert in LA and flew all the way to NY to see the show. I met a woman who was celebrating her 71st birthday (she looked no older than 51!) and a bunch of girls from Dallas to name a few... Then on the subway platform I was approached by dozens of people! Many from California, some lovely senior ladies from Tennessee and Long Island, a couple from Albany...and everyone had truly loved the show. It was so special--that so many people of all different ages and from all different places shared a communal joyous experience. I feel so honored and blessed to be doing my job. I'm at a loss for words...

I'm 2 Stories High...

...on a billboard at 47th and Broadway in Times Square! Crazy, Amazing, a bit surreal, and GLORIOUS!

Playing in the sandbox

Tuesday night Oct. 4--

My worst show thus far. Let's start in the a.m. though...

I woke up Tuesday morning and despite a day off, I felt like a train hit me. Immediately I worried about how I'd get through the show that night. I was a bit confused as to the reason for my exhaustion...after all, I haven't partied, had a drink, gone out, seen my friends, had a life outside of Piazza for 6 weeks! Why should this morning be a killer? Perhaps I needed more rest yesterday (Monday our day off) and shouldn't have walked around the city with my parents? That's crazy though right? I'm supposed to hole myself up in my apartment and not move whenever I have a chance to rest?

I laid around on my sofa feeling shitty until I rallied a friend to go see the invited dress rehearsal of The Odd Couple. I hoped getting out of my apartment would wake me up a bit. No such luck. It was just gonna be one of those days.

I got to the theater and dreaded going on stage--I really didn't know if I'd be able to get through the show. At about half hour though a little adrenalin kicked in and I started to think things might be O.K.. And looking back on that show--that's all they were--O.K.. Unfortunately that's not good enough. I know in a long running show I'm going to have good shows and bad shows, but this show was just UGH! I found myself praying to G-d in the middle of Passegiata that he get me through the number...I just felt like I was fighting my body and my voice the whole show. Thankfully, nothing major went wrong, but I wasn't very good. And, being pretty tough on myself, I beat myself up for it.

Let's cut to today--nearly a week (7 shows) later. Things are great. It's my day off and I finished the week with 4 very strong performances this weekend for sell out, fantastic crowds. Why the swing in my luck? Is it luck? What changed? I'm still exhausted (as I feel i may be as Fabrizio until this show closes :). I think I know...

Thursday night my long time acting coach came to see the show. I was nervous knowing she was out there and that I hadn't had a good performance since the week before. After the show we talked and she felt although I was "great", that I was tired, over-working the material a bit, and thinking too much up there. These are things that probably only a few people would notice, but Joan and I both knew she was right. I was determined to get out of my slump, but how? I had been trying every way I knew how since Tuesday's poor performance and couldn't seem to shake it.

As fate would have it, before the show on Friday, Vicki came into my dressing room to chat because she had finished getting ready early. In over a month of performances, this was a first and a nice surprise. She just wanted to see how I was doing, etc; I told her I felt like I was in a funk. That I was still getting last minute notes from our director & some cast members that I felt were difficult to work on minutes later in a performance. That I was tired. That I was frustrated...Vicki smiled...she said, "Can you think of this whole thing like playing in a giant sandbox? We're just kids out there playing."

Something clicked. It's sooooo simple! But so true! I was working too hard because I wasn't really playing out there. I was thinking about notes and pushing the material in certain directions instead of letting it pull me around the stage. I was determined to go out Friday night and just 'play in the sandbox'!

And by golly if it didn't work!!! The show was effortless and fun again! I lived Fabrizio without having to work it. I just let things go as they wanted to. I was so much more in the moment and playing with my fellow actors having a GREAT time telling this story. My voice relaxed and appeared less tired, my energy flowed, my mind cleared, scenes were different...it was a revelation!

And I played in the sandbox all weekend to similar results. Thank you Vicki!!!

What's great is that I've always been able to recognize when something isn't working in my performances, when I'm overworking or overthinking things, but I've never really been able to fix the problem. Now I have a solution. So simple. I had worked so hard in rehearsal and on stage for a month with Fabrizio, it was time to just let everything go...there was no more need to keep working things so hard....only to play...to play in the giant sandbox!

Shooting the Piazza Commercial

On Thursday of this past week, the cast of Piazza gathered on stage for a blocking/set-up rehearsal of the television commercial for Piazza we'd be shooting the next day. Basically, the commercial director Chuck (a GREAT guy--very professional, calm, charming, and a big fan of our show :) would gather whoever was needed for a particular shot and explain to us the blocking/action for the actors and the camera. His crew was busy doing preliminary lighting work, our crew was busy helping with lights, sets, props...and the actors were busy trying to remember the blocking for what would ultimately become 11 approximately 3 second shots that would be edited into a 30second TV commercial.

The shoot itself started at 8:30 the next morning. Pretty harsh considering we had a show only 9 hrs. earlier and had 4 more shows to get through starting 2 hours after the shoot would finish on Friday night. But it was fun! We had a light catered breakfast and lunch, a make-up artist keeping us all pretty (she was fantastic), and I finally got to spend some quality time with the cast! I mean they all had 5 weeks of 8 hr. rehearsal days together, but I only rehearsed with them for 8 hrs. total (spread out over 2 weeks) before going on. So it was really great hanging out with my new 'family away from home' so to speak.

The day went pretty smoothly with no major snaffus (i.e. lights breaking, shots not looking right and having to be reconfigured, etc;). And because the shots were such small snippets of moments in the show, once the lighting was set, our job as actors was really easy. Just show up, relax, act and repeat--usually about 6-10 takes per set-up. But remember, the action itself in each shot lasted only a few seconds. It felt as though right when Chuck was calling 'action' he'd be saying 'cut' a moment later. It was a crazy compacted version of the basic Piazza plotline.

Since it was shot digitally (it's ridiculous how high quality digital has gotten. I got to watch on the monitors shots I wasn't in and they looked stunning), post production shouldn't take more than a few weeks. So look out for me on TV sometime this month. Unfortunately, I won't be singing (only Kelli and Victoria have 1 singing line each that helps underscore the action and i believe the rest is just orchestration), but the finished product should be really nice and hopefully avoid many of the cheesy pitfalls a lot of show commercials fall into.

Oh! I'm also gonna be on a billboard in Times Square (a monster version of our new photo poster of the show) in a few weeks. Let me know if you see it before i do :)

L'SHANA TOVA!